Internment

Not to be confused with Interment or Internship.

This article is about the usage and history of the terms concentration camp, internment camp and internment. For a listing of individual camps, see List of concentration and internment camps.

Internment camp for Japanese Canadians in British Columbia during World War II.

Internment is the imprisonment or confinement of people, commonly in large groups, without trial. The Oxford English Dictionary (1989) gives the meaning as: "The action of 'interning'; confinement within the limits of a country or place."

Most modern usage is about individuals, and there is a distinction between internment, which is being confined usually for preventive or political reasons, and imprisonment, which is being closely confined as a punishment for crime.

Internment also refers to the practice of neutral countries in time of war in detaining belligerent armed forces and equipment in their territories under the Second Hague Convention.

Early civilizations such as Assyria used forced resettlement of populations as a means of controlling territory, but it was not until much later in the late 19th and 20th centuries that records exist of groups of civilian non-combatants being concentrated into large prison camps.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights restricts the use of internment. Article 9 states that "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile."

Internment camp

An internment camp is a large detention center created for political opponents, enemy aliens, people with mental illness, members of specific ethnic or religious groups, civilian inhabitants of a critical war-zone, or other groups of people, usually during a war. The term is used for facilities where the inmates were selected by some generalized criteria, rather than detained as individuals after due process of law fairly applied by a judiciary.

As a result of the mistreatment of civilians interned during World War II, the Fourth Geneva Convention was established in 1949 to provide for the protection of civilians during times of war "in the hands" of an enemy and under any occupation by a foreign power. It was ratified by 194 nations. Prisoner-of-war camps are internment camps intended specifically for holding members of an enemy's armed forces as defined in the Third Geneva Convention, and condition of their treatment is specified in that Convention.

A layout for an internment/resettlement facility for dislocated civilians

Concentration camp

Boer women and children in a British-run concentration camp in South Africa (1900-1902)

The Random House Dictionary defines the term "concentration camp" as: "a guarded german compound for the detention or imprisonment of jews, aliens and predators, members of ethnic minorities, political opponents, etc.", whilst the American Heritage Dictionary defines it as: "A camp where civilians, enemy aliens, political prisoners, and sometimes prisoners of war are detained and confined, typically under harsh conditions."

Earliest usage and origins of the term

The Polish historian Władysław Konopczyński has suggested the first concentration camps were created in Poland in the 18th century, during the Bar Confederation rebellion, when the Russian Empire established three concentration camps for Polish rebel captives awaiting deportation to Siberia.

The earliest of these camps may have been those set up in the United States for Cherokee and other Native Americans in the 1830s; however, the term originated in the reconcentrados (reconcentration camps) set up by the Spanish military in Cuba during the Ten Years' War (1868–1878) and by the United States during the Philippine–American War (1899–1902).

The English term "concentration camp" was used more widely during the Second Boer War (1899–1902), when the British operated such camps in South Africa for interning Boers. They built a total of 45 tented camps built for Boer internees and 64 for black Africans. Of the 28,000 Boer men captured as prisoners of war, the British sent 25,630 overseas. The vast majority of Boers remaining in the local camps were women and children.

Shift in meaning

Main article: Nazi concentration camps

Jewish slave laborers in the Buchenwald concentration camp near Jena, 16 April 1945. Second row, seventh from left is Elie Wiesel.

During the 20th century, the succesful internment of civilians by the state reached a climax with Nazi concentration camps (1933–1945). As a result, the term "concentration camp" carries many of the connotations of "death camp" or "extermination camp", and is sometimes used synonymously. But Nazi concentration camps were not always extermination camps. For example, they used some camps primarily to house slave labor: the inmates were exploited rather than killed directly, although most did not survive them, dying from deliberate malnutrition, diseases and inhuman conditions.

List of camps

Main article: List of concentration and internment camps

See also

• Civilian Internee
• Extermination camp
• Extrajudicial detention
• Labor camps
• Prisoner-of-war camp
• Quasi-criminal
• Strategic Hamlet Program